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Music the fabric of Brown’s life

Musician Chris Brown at his Wolfe Island home on Friday December 8 2017 the island's former post office, doubles as a recording studio and as the headquarters of his new(ish) record label, Wolfe Island Records. Peter Hendra /The Kingston Whig-Standard/Postmedia Network

Hugh Christopher “Chris” Brown has a tendency to find music — actually, he would say that it finds him — in the most unexpected places: while at a funeral, sitting in a Toronto lawyer’s kitchen, or even from behind bars.

Take that first example. The Wolfe Island resident was at a church attending a service for a fallen friend, and “I hear this voice singing ‘Panis Angelicus.’

“I look up and it’s Shari [Zborovsky]. And I was like, ‘My neighbour?’ So I wrote [a] piece for her, and I was like, ‘I’m going to use you.’”

So Brown grabbed his analog recording equipment and set up inside the island’s Sacred Heart church, and asked Zborovsky to sing a chant, which became “Prayer of St. Ignatius,” the opening track of Brown’s new record, Pacem (Latin for peace).

After he had recorded her, he headed to New York and his recording studio in Brooklyn, where he worked on the song with friend Tony Scherr, who also plays standup bass.

He then brought it back to his studio on Wolfe Island, which is also his home, to add the final touches.

That Brown — a multi-instrumentalist who first got into music as a member of Toronto’s Bourbon Tabernacle Choir and has toured with the likes of The Tragically Hip, The Barenaked Ladies, and B.B. King, among many others — found the time to record and release a solo album is an accomplishment in itself. This year alone he has been working on seven different albums, as his work sitting behind a mixing board has taken up most of his time for the past half-dozen years.

He has been so busy making records for the likes of David Corley, Suzanne Jarvie (whose songs he first heard in that aforementioned kitchen) and Stephen Stanley that he even launched his own label, Wolfe Island Records, this past summer to keep everything straight.

“It’s just been an evolution from writing and playing to producing, and usually managing, now, all facets of it,” he said. “A lot of these records I’ve produced, engineered, recorded and mixed.”

In fact, Brown had initially intended Pacem to be an acoustic solo album, but he changed his mind.

“The reality of my life is this abundance of musicians,” he laughed, “so I just opened up.”

He plans to take some of his label-mates on a cross-country tour early in the new year.

In the meantime, though, he has plenty of other projects to keep him busy in his cedar-shingled home on Wolfe Island, just steps from the ferry in Marysville.

“This place organically became home and operation central,” Brown said while standing in his kitchen and cooking scrambled eggs, “and then it became necessary in the last little while to organize, which is why [I started] Wolfe Island Records, because all of these interrelated projects.”

Before it became his home and a recording studio, the house served as the island’s post office. In what used to be its reception area sits vintage recording equipment, a few guitars, piano, a trombone and even a tuba. The adjoining space that housed post office boxes is now the kitchen.

The other half of the rustic house, Brown said, used to be closed off and inside it lived a mother raising eight children (Brown and eight cats now live there instead).

Brown, who first travelled to Wolfe Island to play in a hockey tournament, discovered the house when he delivered a bottle of wine to one of the musicians staying in it during the early days of the island’s music festival, and he would buy it from the owner, also a musician, soon after.

Stepping inside, one wouldn’t think it’s big enough for a band of musicians and their gear. It’s a small space filled with pictures, albums, books and furniture, so much so that sometimes the dining table has to be moved out of the way to make room for the band to set up. That it’s made of wood and without a right angle to be found makes it a great place to record, the self-taught producer remarked.

And there’s a romantic feel to it as well, he feels.

“Here we are on Wolfe Island making records in an old post office. That’s what’s happening. And in between takes you’re cutting and stacking wood. The place is heated by that woodstove,” Brown said, pointing at the potbelly one in the corner. “And there’s cats running around everywhere.”

And that it’s on an island, removed from the day to day of city life, also makes it attractive.

“There’s nothing else happening but us making music here,” Brown said. “When people come here, they’re removed from all of their responsibilities.”

That was certainly one of the attractions for former Lowest of the Low member Stephen Stanley. He opted for Brown and Wolfe Island instead of Toronto, which he felt was too “cookie cutter” for him, to record his first album, Jimmy and the Moon, with his new band.

Stanley liked what he heard when he listened to the critically lauded albums Brown produced for Corley and Jarvie and wanted a similar “vibe” for his own.

“I think, for a lack of a better description, it felt very organic to me,” Stanley explained. “I think there’s a separation — in my mind, anyway, but I’m not sure if this is what people who listen to music think — but I think there’s a separation of stuff coming out of big production studios right now. It’s really polished. This has a lot of the rough edges still on it, so I think that has a lot to do with it.”

Stanley’s album took more than a year to complete, and he always looked forward to his trips to the island for about four days every month.

And, since his band were getting to know each other, they would sometimes pop down to the General Wolfe or Island Grill to squeeze in an impromptu set or two.

“The other bonus about the island is the people there, and his friends, are amazing. Every night we’d get an invite to dinner somewhere, and people would always be dropping by with bottles of wine and cake and stuff. It was really cool,” recalled Stanley, who feels Brown is one of the top keyboard players in North America right now.

“I don’t know if that comes across on the record, but it’s certainly part of it for me. As I feel confident about it and happy to have people hear it, I think that it’s on there. I think the whole idea of why we loved making this is on there.”

Brown’s thumbprint is on the album as much as his, Stanley feels, and his greatest strength as a producer is that “he’s deceptively great at creating a sonic landscape.

“I found that as we built this record you didn’t see it coming, but when it finally was capitulated, it was like, ‘Wow, we’ve got something pretty cool here.’”

All of the records he produces, Brown said, “feel very rooted.”

“No one that I’m working with right now is doing so under the promise of having a platinum record. They’re doing so under the promise of self-realization and getting at something that eludes us unless we really spend the time,” he explained.

Even with his new album and producing commitments — he has actually hired some people to help him — Brown is still pursuing his social justice work, specifically his “Pros and Cons” project, which sees him and other professional musicians play and teach music with inmates. In fact, when a segment about the project was broadcast on CBC Radio’s Tapestry show, he immediately received a message from the family of project participant Lloyd Ingraham, who thought he was dead.

Ingraham, who sings on Brown’s new Pacem record, was reunited with his family and has since met the grandchildren he never knew he had.

Now with some funding to help him bring in help, Brown has widened the scope of the project and will be releasing an album from the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener in March, on International Women’s Day.

“Music’s been so much a fabric in my life that sometimes I don’t even notice,” he reflected.

“Going into prison and watching what it does to the individuals and to people’s relationships makes me understand the effect it’s had on my own life.”

Brown remembers someone telling him they were surprised he had survived in music for so long without ever having a hit record.

“Every year seems to be different. This year’s on the road with The Tragically Hip. These two or three years are in New York playing with a ton of people. This year’s on the road with B.B. King,” he reminisced.

“The last five, six years, almost exclusively, has been in the studio here producing tons of records. And the prison stuff is growing in a way I can’t even keep up with. I think what feels right about the island is, like I said, it’s allowed a more internal focus, which has really meshed well with pursuits.”